Friday, November 06, 2015

The clouds that own us: how animate is the weather?

Animacy - human or animal or object - often makes a big difference in grammar. However, what counts as animate, and when, is not always straightforward. In English, an adult or a child can only be "he" or "she", but a baby can already be "it"; an animal is usually "it", but a pet is quite likely to be "he" or "she". (And that's without even discussing sailors and Australians).

Going through some Tuareg texts from Mali recently, I found a rather eloquent passage describing the nomads' relationship to their land:

exắy năkkắneḍ, húllăn ăgg ăjăma wăr ăddobăt ád ikrəš ắkall făll ắkall, năkkắneḍ tijắrăken a-hənăɣ ílăn əntănắteḍ á-dagg nəkká d ắšăkšo, wắr noleh d ə́ddinăt wí n ɣərman, dihá-hənăɣ əttə́mălăn súdar e rə́zzejăn ɣás á nəkká, ášăl wa əssinḍărắn-anăɣ dắɣ teje ta n ătắram, ášăl wa ta n ăfắlla ášăl wa ta n əjúss, mušám wăddén á ikkắsăn erhitt-nắnăɣ y ắkall wa s ə́nta, á nəzzáy isidáw-anăɣ năkkắneḍ dătén tərə́zzekk-nắnăɣ.
Yes, as for us, a son of the wilderness cannot hold to just one place. Us, it's the clouds that own us, it's they that we go under, and the vegetation, we aren't like the people of the towns. There where staple foods are excellent for our animals is where we go. One day they toss us to the west, one day to the north, one day to the south. But it doesn't prevent our desire for the land which is what we know, it keeps us together with our flocks. (Heath 2005:18-21)

Now, -la- "own, have" does not have quite the same semantics as English "own"; you use it not only in reference to your property, but also to your children, and one can easily say "God owns us (yl-ânaɣ)" (Prasse 2010:30). Nevertheless, its subject is ordinarily human, as in English. The most obvious comparison here is with ownership of livestock. The clouds control where we go (by determining where vegetation will grow), just as we control where our flocks go; therefore, the clouds own us. Throughout the world's languages, control is commonly associated with higher animacy.

Quite coincidentally, I came across a clearer example on the other side of the world shortly afterwards. Omaha is a Native American language of the Siouan family, still spoken by a few elders in Nebraska. It has one of the most complicated systems of classificatory definite articles that I've ever seen: in particular, there are four articles normally used for inanimates, and several normally used for animates, depending on number, position, and whether they're moving, described in detail in Eschenberg (2005). As part of their efforts to revive the language, the Omaha Nation commissioned an iPad/iPhone app, effectively a small phrasebook/lexicon with audio and pictures. This happily includes a few minimal pairs, of which the most interesting for this post is, under "Weather":

This is systematic in Omaha, as noted by Eschenberg (2005:71-73); nouns such as "winter", "sun", and "snow" can (but need not) occur with animate as well as inanimate articles, and Eschenberg explicitly ties this to the fact that these entities have great power over people's lives and are not themselves readily controllable.

So is there any English parallel? You certainly wouldn't say "The rain, s/he stopped" in standard English. One possibility comes to mind, however: the curious habit of giving human names to hurricanes. Within weather, hurricanes are about the most powerful recurrent objects we are capable of perceiving at a human scale. And - what do you know - it turns out that some people do accept animate pronouns for named storms, strange though it sounds to me:

"This makes Patricia a 'Category Five' hurricane as she has sustained winds of over 157 mph." (ITV, 23 October 2015)
"Sadly, Patricia is not expected to weaken by the time she reaches Mexico and will hit when she’s a Category 5 hurricane." (Hollywood Life)

Obvious follow-up question: should global warming be treated as animate?

13 comments:

Y
said...

The semantic parameter which looks like animacy, but is more like control or power, makes me think of the Polynesian concept of mana, spiritual power. By some analyses (Mulloy and Rapu, J. Polynesian Soc. 86:7, 1977; Thornton, JPS 107:381, 1998) what is called inalienable vs. alienable possession in Polynesian languages translates more naturally into a difference of mana between the possessor and the possessed.

"It has one of the most complicated systems of classificatory definite articles that I've ever seen: in particular, there are four articles normally used for inanimates, and several normally used for animates, depending on number, position, and whether they're moving, described in detail in Eschenberg (2005)."

This is somewhere along the spectrum of articles and noun classes and measure words. I can see how over a few centuries a language got slip one way or the other along that spectrum.

it turns out that some people do accept animate pronouns for named storms, strange though it sounds to me:

Using "it" with a name would sound much stranger to me.

But then, I natively speak a dialect where names obligatorily take articles. If you ask little children for their names, the answer is likely to begin with "I am the" (m or f as appropriate), followed by the first name.

...Oh, while I am at it, there are German dialects where women's names take the neuter article (and – back to the topic – the neuter pronoun), extrapolated from "girl", which is a diminutive and therefore neuter*. It takes some getting used to hearing this!

* Bizarrely enough. I have no idea why German doesn't have separate gendered diminutive suffixes like pretty much the rest of Indo-European; it has two diminutive suffixes, and both are neuter.

In English, non-natural animacy is not only tied to names, it is tied to membership in a class. In "I see no long-term problems with Sir John; she is fundamentally sound" we have something that has a name and is probably a boat or a bell, which are two of the arbitrary list of non-naturally animate classes. As far as I know, all such classes are feminine. I bet if someone counts those sentences, ones like "Hurricane Andrew smashed many buildings in Florida with his titanic wind speeds" are far less common than similar sentences with female hurricanes.

Y: those sound like interesting papers; I like the idea of integrating culture-specific concepts into grammatical analyses.

Jim: yes, the articles definitely have classifier function as well, and there's enough conventionalisation that one could speak of incipient noun classes. Remarkably, they appear to derive from verbs.

David: And of course, across IE, the neuter plural looks like a feminine singular, which I suppose could promote interchange between the two classes in some contexts.

John: I wasn't aware you could do that for bells too. Some English dialects allow rather more productive use of animate pronouns for inanimate objects - there was a good paper about that phenomenon in Tasmanian English, where apparently both she and he feature depending on the speaker's attitude towards the object. I should track down the reference.

And of course, across IE, the neuter plural looks like a feminine singular, which I suppose could promote interchange between the two classes in some contexts.

Of course; lots of Romance feminines come from Latin neuter plurals, for instance la feuille via the plural folia from the singular folium "leaf". But after approximately umpteen rounds of apocope and steamrollering of other unstressed vowels, that plays no role in German, if that's what you mean.

...Coming to think of it, though, the cases of gender vacillation in German (always with a geographic dimension to them) often involve gender reassignment surgery – the presence or absence of something that sometimes is a gendered ending: die Ecke ~ das Eck "corner"*, die Socke ~ der Socken "sock"...

"Jim: yes, the articles definitely have classifier function as well, and there's enough conventionalisation that one could speak of incipient noun classes. Remarkably, they appear to derive from verbs."

Dr. Souag, that's not strange, at least to my perspective. Probably most classifiers in Mandarin derive from verbs. That may simply be a fossilization of normal syntax, e.g bǎ​ dāo 'to grasp (in one hand) a knife' > y​ī​ bǎ​ dāo​ 'a knife' (One grasped knife; one grasp of a knife.)

Actually, that might not be a good example, because almost all feminine -e words get this -n levelled in in the dialects in question (from what must have been the rest of the declension) but stay feminine. Alternatively, I suggest die Peter[ˈ]silie ~ der [ˈ]Petersil "parsley".

And "often" doesn't seem to be true either; I can find a longer list of words with unstable gender that end in a consonant (or former consonant: -r) everywhere.

Schok(o)lad(e f.) m. could be another example, but I think it's quite a bit more likely that these versions represent more or less independent borrowings. The nickname-like form Schoko is not limited to a dialect and is masculine everywhere.